Welcome

Asking the Big Questions

Obligatory Alex Grey art.
Berkeley!
What are we?  What makes us?  Who, or perhaps what, are you?  I've been fascinated by this kind of #deep question since as long as I can remember.  It has led me on various jaunts of learning, through Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychedelia, Spirituality, and Psychology.  I cannot tell you if the answers I have found are the same answers that you will find, but I hope this site -- a portfolio of my professional and personal projects, will inspire your interest in the same sort of question, or give you a hint along the way.

We rarely hear the inner music, but we are all dancing to it nonetheless.
- Rumi
Oh, right, on to a more reasonable biographical followed by a portfolio:

I grew up in a canyon outside of Salt Lake City, Utah.  I am something of a second-generation hippy, and didn't quite fit in with the Mormon culture of my hometown, mostly making friends with the children of immigrants.   After going to college at Caltech, I moved north to become a Neuroscientist and Data Scientist in the Bay Area, which has been my home for around 10 years.   I've started a handful of grouphouses, worked for Google, speak some Mandarin, practice Buddhism, and have been to Burning Man -- just like the San Franciscans you've heard about in the news.  But enough about who I am.   Whatever my proclivity or personality type, it's the type that makes a lot of content.   Most of this site is devoted to that. Please do reach out if you are interested in research collaboration, coaching, or consultation!

Research and Teaching

I have two Neuroscience degrees (Caltech BA 2013, UC Berkeley Masters 2019). I have also worked as a researcher and Data Scientist at Google Machine Intelligence, YouTube, and Verily Life Sciences. My research interests span medical imaging, neuroscience, machine intelligence, and Dharma science.

Autofluorescence Microscopy

While at Verily, I worked on the Virtual Stainer project. We used generative learning to predict histological stains from autofluorescence scans of unstained tissue. See (McNeil et al., 2024), in Modern Pathology, and other publications.

Medical Image Embedding

I worked on a project to use Masked-Siamese Networks to embed colonscopy videos in a semi-supervised way. See (Shor, McNeil et al., 2024)

Functional Neuroanatomy

While at Berkeley, I was in the Gallant Lab within the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research org, working on fMRI research projects to model the human visual system.

Human Emotion

While at Google Machine Intelligence, I kicked off a collaboration between Google and Berkeley to study emotion in human faces using DNNs. 5 years later, this collaboration produced (Cowen et al. 2021) in Nature. I have an ongoing interest in emotion and mental health.

Creative Content

Scienctific work is creative work. But I have also produced a lot of more casual content.

YouTube Lectures

I have several long-form talks on psycho-spiritual frameworks on my YouTube Channel. These were given at a private event, and due to popular acclaim, I posted them online. Perhaps more on this theme will follow.

Essays

I write essays sometimes, which I post to my Medium. The topics range between philosophy, poetic, light research projects, and psychology. For example:

Flirtations with Death

Epicurus said, in 300 BC, that death is not a harm, for “When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not.” … My sister and I were raised on the story of my father’s father, bedridden by lung cancer, choosing to pull the plug …

A Gradual Training in Teetotalism

The Greek word “pharmakon”, from which we derive “pharmaceutical” was a word that meant, synonymously, either “medicine” or “poison”. In Chinese, the expression 吃药三分毒 means roughly, “all medicine is 30% poison” …

ADHD: Steroids, The Gym, and The Game

The Game is changing, and this is twice as true on college campuses, where the amphetamine black market is booming … Given my own experience and that of friends, I was surprised to see the positive effects [of meditation] were so mild, until I saw the meditation protocols. … Would you go to the gym for 5 minutes a day and expect any sort of change?

Contact

This contact form will send to a tagged place in my email, where I am likely to see and respond to it.